Tuesday, November 22, 2011

puttin my feet up, upholstery done

I'm putting my feet up, forgetting all about the chairs. The chairs are behind me now. They're done and recovered. Recovered is the word I've been looking for. I've been obsessed by these chairs and coming up with one-hundred-and-one reasons why. But it's totally obvious now: the chairs are recovered. They're cured. They're not lonely anymore. They're not sick anymore. They've been saved. They would have gone into the dump, but now they are beautiful again. They are about moving on in this life. Moving on is the most beautiful sorrow, but a good chair can see you through it. These chairs are really good. Here's me, sitting in my grandmother's old wooden chair, my feet up on the desk, looking at a picture of a chair I refurbished that I have not found the nerve to sit on yet. I have too many chairs on the mind. A chair is a thing you can think about forever.

But the chairs really did come out nicely. I have mixed feelings about a couple of them—one has already become the official ugly duckling—and the other one I just can't understand. It's the other one that I'm talking about here. My mind boggles over this chair. Do I like this chair? Do I dislike this chair? Do I even want to sit on this chair? It's a hideous chair. Still, though, it charms me. Here it is, the charmer.

This chair is the way this chair is for a good reason. In the end there was not quite enough of the blue paisley fabric to cover the seat. We'd prioritized covering the backs first. (Good advice.) The backs were in terrible shape, had been totally destroyed by a cat, foam bulging out of them like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium smoke blowing out of the crater hole in Mt. Vesuvius. These chairs were wasted. But getting back on track, it's the fact that this chair was the last one in the soup line that endears it so much to me. When this chair got to the pot, there were no more beans. So it had rice. With butter. Which was not too shabby, the chair's attitude was good. But here is the chair that the chair judges would choose:

There are actually two of these—in the sense that identical twins are two. It's hard to tell them apart unless you really know them, which you don't. So here's just one of them. I think the reason the judges would choose this model is obvious enough. This model just feels better. It feels more right than the others. But this is all so totally subjective, which is why these chairs beguile me. The fabric and the frame are a better match here. Everywhere I turn with these damn chairs, I find another convenient metaphor for togetherness and separation. I'm throwing all my questions onto these chairs—blah blah blah. Here's the perplexing chair.

I just took a piss, and I thought to myself, "break-up chairs." It was just some words that flashed through my head while I peed. "That'd be a good status update," I said to myself, peeing, but then I sat I back down at my desk and realized that it would not be a good status update, that I wanted to think about it more. "Would people like 'break-up chairs,'" I thought, poking around in the refrigerator. "Would people understand what I mean," I thought, thinking about sweeping the floor again. "People, Jono, are probably watching Youtube." I told myself this and decided against updating my status. But I have gone astray here. My point was that I cannot understand this chair. I look at this chair and I cannot understand it. I don't really like it this chair. This chair seems so alien and so cool to me. There are cheerful spots and question marks on it. And those are nice. "You can look forward to cheerful spots and questions marks." I tell myself this every morning. Most of them anyway.